A Farewell to StreamToMe
I fixed the bugs but now I had a different problem: customers, lots of them, all wanting features. If they all wanted the same features, there might not be a problem but I quickly learned that media is a deeply personal experience and everyone wants to experience it a different way.
Ever wondered why all the major media player are a weird kitchen-sink of features bolted onto each other? Media players are a product-space where everyone uses a tiny slice of the features but no two users use the same slice of features and the entire space is really, really broad.
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Like an idiot, I scrambled to add as many features as I could. Unfortunately, I ended up with a huge swath of features that I didn’t really use and the app stopped starting to feel like it properly catered to me. For something that started as a personal passion project, I was starting to feel like an dispassionate observer, rather than a passionate participant.
And as the feature set grew, so did a different class of maintenance problems and these were not simple bugs that could be fixed.
That's sad, even if totally understandable. The point I'm stuck on, did the developer succinctly describe why he didn't open source any of the project? I see allusions to the fact, but seems like that point wasn't really explained well. Maybe I just missed it?